The University of KwaZulu-Natal offers profound condolences to the family, loved ones and colleagues of Sam Moyo, a UKZN Centre for Civil Society Honorary Professor who died in New Delhi, India early on Sunday, November 22. Moyo, 61, was at the peak of his career, having recently presided over the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (2008-11). He had built up the Harare-based African Institute for Agrarian Studies as a leading site for research and teaching.

Moyo was co-supervisor of two UKZN doctoral students studying Zimbabwe’s land reform, and was a regular participant in intellectual events in Durban. With CCS co-hosting, he was awarded for his contributions at the World Association for Political Economy in June, and was named a vice-chairperson of that association. Amongst his major innovations was deploying the most sophisticated Marxist analysis to what he termed rural Africa’s ‘trimodal’ agrarian structure.

Moyo passed away following a car accident on 20 November, when he was driven back to his hotel after a conference at Jawaharlal Nehru University. He was in his element at that conference, entitled Labour in the South, with his closest collaborators nearby, and had just delivered papers on “Labour Questions in the African Periphery” and “Capitalism and Labour Reserves.”

Moyo earned his PhD in Rural Development and Environmental Management from the University of Northumbria, having received earlier degrees in geography from the Universities of Western Ontario and Sierra Leone. During the early 1980s he taught in Nigeria at the Universities of Port Harcourt and Calabar. He returned to Zimbabwe in 1983 and established a career focus on land and natural resources management, civil society organisations, capacity building and institutional development. His publications included 10 authored or co-authored books, 11 co-edited books and nearly 100 other chapters or academic articles, and he founded the academic journal Agrarian South. His most recent book, co-edited with Walter Chambati, was Land and Agrarian Reform in Zimbabwe (Codesria, 2013), and with Paris Yeros he co-authored a book chapter about African geopolitics for a collection co-edited by CCS Director Patrick Bond, BRICS (Jacana Press 2015), entitled ‘Scramble, resistance and a new non-alignment strategy.’

During the 1980s-90s he held leadership positions at the Southern Africa Regional Institute for Policy Studies and the University of Zimbabwe’s Institute of Development Studies and Department of Agriculture and Rural Development. He was also a land consultant to the Government of Zimbabwe, and celebrated the post-2000 land reform while offering mixed reviews of implementation given its circumstances. He also consulted to the governments of Sierra Leone and South Africa. And he founded the Harare NGO ZERO: A Regional Environment Organisation, which he also chaired.

As University of Dar es Salaam Professor Emeritus Issa Shivji put it, “We have lost one of our great comrades: utterly committed, a most unassuming scholar and an absolutely decent human being.” Indeed Moyo captured the spirit of his times in Zimbabwe and ours in Durban: intellectual hunger, an insistence on theorising not just describing social relations, progressive aspirations for transformed power relations in a profoundly unequal rural landscape, a critical spirit that meant he was often on the wrong side of political elites, and an infinite generosity. His professional networks were also the sites for conviviality and nurturing of the next generation of progressive scholars. He worked with civil society and helped build social organisation wherever he could.

Admired by rural scholars across the world, Moyo was academically inspirational, as Zimbabwe’s most cited organic-turned-professional intellectual, and as a genuine Pan-African scholar. His memory will demand from his admirers a renewed commitment to combining intellectual rigour and the passion for social justice that he personified, all with the sense of humour and love of life that kept him surviving and thriving in Zimbabwe’s stressed conditions.

Sam Moyo: A Scholar for the Oppressed (1954-2015)Arindam Banerjee

The tragic and untimely departure of Sam Moyo from amidst us creates a void that can be filled only through an uncompromising commitment towards the poor and an unflinching solidarity with struggles of historically oppressed people. Passionate as he was about correcting the past injustices faced by the ‘South’ through long and variegated histories of imperialism, Sam made his arguments based on crisp logic and hard evidence. Till his last day, he was an inspiring and untiring soldier against injustices and inequality, both historical and of contemporary origin.

The enormous span of Sam’s scholarship covering issues like the land question, agrarian development, food sovereignty and rural development, to name a few, comes across as an integrated and comprehensive critique of imperialism, in its evolving forms, including neo-liberalism as the recent most form. The deep engagement with the exploitative processes of imperialism, often transgressing the boundaries of traditional disciplines in his treatment of the subject, has been an inseparable part of Sam’s academic writings. He has also been truly exceptional in recognizing the necessity of creating indigenous knowledge and understanding from the ‘South’ and devoting his energies to building solidarity between scholars and activists from various ex-colonies.

Through his numerous papers, monographs and books, Sam Moyo has developed and presented a colossal understanding of the land question in his own country, Zimbabwe, and in the larger landscape of Southern Africa. As part of the Lancaster House Agreement which assisted Zimbabwe’s transition to independence, the land question was attempted to be addressed within the neo-classical, market-based ‘willing buyer-willing seller model', focussing on questions of efficiency and bereft of any recognition of past land alienation faced by the “natives”. In contrast, Sam’s analysis of the land question was always anchored on the long, historical land expropriation from the native black population, through territorial and legal segregation policies, under white-settler colonialism in Zimbabwe, like in other parts of Southern Africa.

He pointed out that such sustained land expropriations meant that at the time of Zimbabwean independence in 1980, 6000 farmers from the white, agrarian bourgeoisie controlled 15.5 million hectares or nearly 50 per cent of agricultural land in the country, while one million black households were confined to the rest of the land. The typical mode of production that such settler-colonialism produced made possible the super-exploitation of a land-short, semi-proletarian black labour, whether in the settler-farms or in the mines, heavily inter-twined with race, gender and ethnic relations. In Sam's own words:

'…white-settler capitalism, organised the labour process such that white capital exercised both 'direct' and 'indirect' power over the indigenous black population…The labour process in colonial Zimbabwe came to be characterised by an enduring contradiction between proletarianisation and a politically-engineered functional dualism, by which petty-commodity production in the communal areas, and especially unwaged female labour, would subsidise the social reproduction of male labour-power on mines and farms. This contradiction would produce neither a settled industrial proletariat nor a viable peasantry, but a workforce in motion, straddling communal lands, white farms, mines, and industrial workplaces. (‘The Land and Agrarian Question in Zimbabwe’, Sam Moyo, 2004)[1]

Armed with a Marxian Political Economy framework and a careful analysis of history, Sam was at a distinct advantage to give superior insights when the radicalization of the land reforms agenda in Zimbabwe occurred in the late nineties leading to the introduction of the Fast Track land Reforms Programme (FTLRP) in 2000. As the head of the Land Reform Technical Advisory Team of the Government of Zimbabwe, he remained a close observer of the FTLRP.

Amidst the political furore over FTLRP, mainly from the 'North', which also led to an economic isolation of Zimbabwe, a considerable academic literature (mostly from the North) put forward the argument that the Zimbabwean land reforms was nothing but ‘land grabbing’ by the black elites and the ruling ZANU-PF cronies; and that such cronyism led to a culture of violence, chaos and disorder, and destroyed the productivity of Zimbabwean agriculture leading to a food crisis.

Questioning this narrative, Sam pointed out the dangers of dubbing the FTLRP as mere 'land grabbing' by the local elites. In an international context, from the nineties, one witnessed a renewed scramble for land in Africa (and other parts of the developing world) by international agri-business capital in the name of raising agricultural productivity and producing 'clean' agro-fuels. Under the pressure of neo-liberalism, most African governments reformed their National Land Policies to allow privatisation and the appropriation of extensive land tracts by foreign capital. According to him, to equate the Zimbabwean FTLRP to a similar ‘chaotic land grab’ was to obfuscate the critique of neo-liberalism and to ignore the question of agency. With exceptional clarity about the politics of this discourse, he wrote in 2011:

'The language of 'land grabbing' creates a moral and political equivalence between the restitutive appropriation of colonially dispossessed lands for state-led land redistribution and the recent externally inspired land grabs in Africa, despite the latter’s neoliberal roots. Preoccupation with a 'chaos' perspective conceals the structure and agency that evolved during the FTLRP…' ('Land Concentration and Accumulation after Redistributive Reform in Post-Settler Zimbabwe, Sam Moyo, Review of African Political Economy, 2011)

Backed by extensive field-work, Sam argued that though a few black elites captured land with the help of government agents, the majority (70 per cent) of 1,65,000 beneficiary households were settled in the small-scale farming sector, with new access to pieces of farmland crucial for their survival. In fact, he underscores that in terms of scale, agency and discourse, the FTLRP was a radical land reform, benefitting people who have been historically evicted from land; and this redistributive reform stood directly pitted against the contemporary and hegemonic neo-liberal logic of capitalist accumulation by dispossession for purposes of export-oriented large-scale food and agro-fuel production.

Despite his strong defence of the FTLRP at a time when his country and government was internationally isolated, it would still be difficult for those who disagreed with Sam to place him in the camp of the Zimbabwean ruling establishment. Even as he reiterated the radical nature of the Zimbabwean land reforms, in the same breath, he criticized his government for making neo-liberal concessions due to pressure from the ‘West’. In a cautionary spirit, he drew attention to the fact that the radical land struggle had still not led to the social democracy that it promised. He observed that most of the farm workers did not benefit from the FTLRP and practices of ‘compound farm labour tenancy’ and low wages continued to reproduce cheap labour as in the past, even when the land monopoly had been broken. Sam’s discourse never abandoned the exploited.

In more recent years, Sam had devoted his scholarship to bringing back the ‘national question’ within the development discourse. Along with his comrades and colleagues from the South, Praveen Jha and Paris Yeros, he explains how the ‘emancipation of peasantries’ from colonial oppression was a central question of the national liberation struggles of colonies and why the peasant question continues to remain relevant under neo-liberal globalization. He saw the latter as a process of re-colonization of the Third World peasantries and natural resources, and peasant resistance to these neo-liberal processes as the ‘primary component’ of the agrarian question in the South presently.

Inspired by the views of Franz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, Sam argued that the peasantry in colonies emerged as a truly revolutionary force under colonialism, channelizing their energies towards the national liberation struggles, and that the latter was a ‘process of self-becoming of a people denied of history by colonial rule and racial doctrine’ (quoted from ‘The Classical Agrarian Question: Myth, Reality and Relevance Today, Sam Moyo et.al., Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 2013). According to him, under contemporary globalization, the new agrarian question is defined by the resistance that the peasantry builds up, in defence of its gains from national liberation, against the neo-colonial systems of domination that have emerged under the aegis of international finance capital.

For Sam, neither the peasantry is ‘dead’, nor is the agrarian question irrelevant. Rather the peasantry was the ‘wretched of the earth’ (to use the term he borrowed from Fanon) carrying all the hopes of resistance to injustice and progressive transformations, both in the colonial period and under imperialist globalization currently.

Along with his comrades, Sam tirelessly gave leadership to the project of developing the conception of the agrarian question from the ‘South’, including the publishing of the Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy. He was, however, not satisfied merely by making his own point convincingly but placed equal importance in creating future generations of scholars who would engage with the peasant question and imperialism. As head of the African Institute of Agrarian Studies (AIAS), he ensured that scores of young scholars from various countries of the South would interact with each other in the annual training workshops in Harare.

On the few occasions that I had the privilege of interacting with him, I always found him inspiring in his own warm and exceptional way. Of these interactions, two need mention. Once when I met him at the South-South Forum for Sustainability, at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, upon knowing that I teach a course on colonialism, he inquired whether I have included African colonial history in the syllabus. Later in the evening, when the sessions were over, he caught hold of me in the corridor and over tea, started a conversation on the colonial past of Africa. By the end of the fairly long conversation, I found myself greatly enriched in my knowledge. I also realized that bringing Africa into the discourse on colonialism, no matter in which corner of the world such a discourse may be developing, was extremely important for Sam!

On the other occasion, when he visited the Ambedkar University in Delhi for a lecture to research students and faculty members on agrarian development, he asked the organizers (who were a bit intrigued by the request) to project a map of Africa on the screens. Using the map, he spoke to the audience for more than an hour, delineating the geography and history of agrarian relations in colonial Africa. During Sam’s lecture, the map came to life as he traversed through the various facets of colonial history and the struggles of the African peasantry. Truly, Africa, its people and the history of their subjugation cannot be comprehended without recognizing the contributions of Sam Moyo. Needless to say, struggles to change that history of exploitation, not only in Africa but in the larger developing world, for a better future where the oppressed are emancipated, will be the noblest tribute to his memory.

Arindam Banerjee is at the Department of Economics of the Ambedkar University, Delhi.

[1] Quoted from the draft of this paper presented at the Conference on ‘The Agrarian Constraint and Poverty Reduction: Macroeconomic lessons for Africa’, Addis Ababa, 17-18 December, 2004/

An Ode in Memory of Chimusoro Sam MoyoBy Bella Matambanadzo

An unimaginable loss has happened. Our phenomenal intellectual pan African giant on land issues, Professor Sam Moyo, has died following injuries sustained during a terrible car accident in New Delhi, India. We are in disbelief. We are waiting for him to come home. We feel ripped apart with pain.

We grew up following you in our townships. We nicknamed you Sekuru 'Chimusoro', the one with the very big head. All our parents wanted us to be exactly like you. At the end of every school term, you would come home with a report card full of number ones. Your arms would be laden with trophies and certificates for best student in this subject; outstanding record in that.

Your mother, Gogo Mavis Moyo's face would beam with enough joy to light up the whole continent. She was a woman of her own accolades, a pioneer black female broadcaster at a time when radio was segregated by racism. But somehow your achievements made her glow in the way that only a mother can do.

We always marveled at the shiny silver cups with your name on them. Playfully, you would fill them with cherry plum juice and serve us to drink along with candy cakes. The pink icing would crease between our fingers. Domestic chores, serving those around you, never bothered you. You had such a deep sense of the hospitality of food, and the power of sharing drinks with those you loved, that we always felt welcome to your side. Our great tree that bore so much fruit. Yes we would laugh, but you would steer us to talk about the thing that mattered most to you; and even if we did not know it then, to us. How to fully reclaim the land that was stolen by the colonial forces.

Throughout your life, you carried your intellectual smarts with so much ease. In your later years, when your trophies had turned to degrees, you would seek us out so we could sit in your seminars. At that time I think you were at the Zimbabwe Institute of Development Studies (ZIDS). Later on you moved to SAPES and taught the SARIPS Masters Programme with radical feminists like Dr Patricia Macfadden you made our brains sweat. In the beginning we would all look at each other unable to write down some of the big words and theories you used. And yet you persisted. Sharing your knowledge with us, crafting an epistemology around land and agrarian rights. Together you showed us why land was a critical resource for women to have ownership and control over.

When we tried to call you Prof, you would smile and say, 'vafana vangu, ndinonzi Sam - my youngsters, I am just Sam.' It didn't matter that you had 'eaten many books' as the saying used to go. You would listen to our elementary theories, nurture us with love and suggest, 'let's write a policy brief on this subject. That's how we will change the world'.

You lent your brilliance to the environmental think tank Zero, pulled us into the Senegal based Codesria and introduced us to people who wore Dashiki shirts as a form of political expression. People whose papers you had photocopied for us to read. This was before computers. It was the time of type-writers. Your scrawl was impossible to decipher, but we knew that if we didn't figure out your handwriting, there would be trouble. You could not abide intellectual laziness.

On Boodle Road, in Harare's Eastlea suburb you set up the African Institute of Agrarian Studies (AIAS). It was nothing short of a bold move. This was Zimbabwe in the early 2000s when land invasions were at their apex. Nothing could deter you. Not physical threats, nor slurs to your name. And who can forget the raid of your home office in Borrowdale. You put your ubiquitous cigarette to your mouth and shock your head. ' why did they have to mess my papers up? I had order here'. I would look at the piles and piles of papers you had and wonder what kind of order you meant. Your office was a project for a neat freak.

Last year, we danced until dawn in your front garden. Your lawn groaned underfoot of our stampede. It was your 60th birthday party. Food, music, friends and land politics. The delicious chocolate cake was a creative meme of your desk. Cellphone, books on land with the spine carrying your name. And of course your friends from all over the world filled your yard. Or skype feed.

By your side was your sweetheart and partner, the top human rights lawyer Beatrice Mtetwa. We marveled at how possible it was for two wonderful, strong and brilliant human beings to love each other so much. It made us feel good to see you dancing. It was as if no one else was around as you smiled at each other and twirled each other to Hugh Masekela's trumpet. Power couples that publicly show each other affection and validation are so very rare in our activist civil society worlds. We were hoping for a huge international African wedding and had decided we were going to be in the bridal party. I don't know how we will comfort you Beatrice. I don't know how we will comfort Gogo Moyo. What will we do for Sibongile and her sisters?

On the days I forgot to call to check on you, you would ring. And demand our company. 'Is Nancy (Kachingwe) around? Where is Saru? Let me make you Oxtail. Bring your friends over'. You always offered your home to us, wether you were there or not.

Thank you for giving us so much of you Sekuru Chimusoro. Siyabonga Moyondizvo. We will forever carry you in our hearts. Broken as they are by your untimely and devastatingly painful death. Alone, so far away from the homeland you fought so hard for.

A tribute to Sam Moyo – a giant of agrarian studiesIan Scoones 23 November 2015

Professor Sam Moyo, director of the African Institute of Agrarian Studies, and a giant of agrarian studies has died tragically as a result of a car accident in New Delhi. This is a terrible loss for Zimbabwe, Africa and the world. Sam had a massive intellect and a deep knowledge of agrarian issues, especially in Zimbabwe. He argued strongly for land reform throughout his career and was always an advocate for radical alternatives that challenged oppression and exploitation in whatever form.

I first got to know Sam in the 1980s, when he was working at the Zimbabwe Institute for Development Studies, then a think tank linked to the President’s office. As a PhD student interested in similar themes, he was always welcoming and encouraging, as he has been to so many others since (see this from Alex Magaisa posted over the weekend). Over the years we have had many, many conversations: always challenging, always inspiring. We did not always agree, but I have always massively respected his commitment, integrity and intellectual depth.

Certainly in the last 15 years, as the debate around Zimbabwe’s controversial land reform has continued, Sam’s contributions – and those of his colleagues at AIAS – have been essential. Their district level study published in 2009 preceded our book, and set the stage for a more mature, empirically-informed debate that (sometimes) has followed. Sam has often been inaccurately pigeon-holed as being on one ‘side’ or another. But his scholarship is far more sophisticated than this. In Zimbabwe’s land debate nearly everyone at different times disagreed with him, but they all listened.

Whether inside the state and party, among opposition groups or with the World Bank and other donors, no one could ignore what Sam had to say. And his influence in seeking a more sensible line has been enormous.

But Sam’s scholar activism was not just focused on Zimbabwe. He was frequently invited by governments, social movements and others around the world, and particularly in southern Africa. His experiences in Nigeria, teaching at Calabar and Port Harcourt universities, were influential too, giving him a wider perspective than many. His on-going contributions to South Africa’s land debates have been important also, as he shared Zimbabwe’s lessons. More broadly still, he was central to a wider engagement with agrarian studies from the global South, offering a challenge to those who argued that the classical agrarian question is dead. From the perspective of peasants, social movements and struggles across the global South, it certainly is not. Together with Paris Yeros in Brazil and Praveen Jha in India, and as part of a wider collective of Southern scholars linked to the journal Agrarian South, he has made the case for a revived agrarian studies, in the context of land grabs and intensifying capitalist exploitation across rural areas.

Sam’s intellectual leadership has inspired many. He was recently president of Codesria, the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, and was a director of the Southern African Regional Institute for Policy Studies (SARIPS) for a period. Since being established in 2002, AIAS in Harare has become a centre for training and research, with the annual summer schools attracting researchers, activists and others from across Africa. Earlier he was involved with ZERO, the Harare-based regional environment organisation, together with Yemi Katerere; another organisation that attracted young researchers who established their careers under Sam’s guidance. Like all the organisations he has been involved with, ZERO was ahead of the game, set up when few were thinking about the connections between environment and development. And, as with AIAS, Codesria, SARIPS and ZIDS, it mixed solid research, with a deep political commitment to social justice and equality.

With the passing of Sam we have lost a giant. I will miss our intense conversations on his veranda in Borrowdale, as we tested out our ideas and findings on each other, and he smoked furiously. I was always a few steps behind Sam, and it took me days to digest the content of our lengthy exchanges. But they have always been important and formative, even when we disagreed. This is a terribly sad moment and this tribute has been difficult to write. Professor Issa Shivji summed up many people’s feelings well in a post on Sunday: “We have lost one of our great comrades: utterly committed, a most unassuming scholar and an absolutely decent human being”. So thanks Sam for your friendship, inspiration and commitment. You will be very sorely missed.

This post was written by Ian Scoones and first appeared on Zimbabweland

Professor Sam Moyo has moved on

CODESRIA regrets to announce the extremely sad news of the passing on of its former President, Professor Sam Moyo. Sam was in New Delhi, India to participate in a conference on “Labour Questions in the Global South”. The vehicle in which he was travelling got involved in a crash in the evening of Thursday, 19 November, and Sam died in the early hours of Sunday 22 November 2015.

Professor Moyo has been an active member of CODESRIA since the 1970s. He was elected Vice-President of CODESRIA in 1998, and during the 12th General Assembly held in Yaounde, Cameron in December 2008, was elected President of CODESRIA, a position he held until December 2011.

The Executive and Scientific Committees, and the staff of CODESRIA present our sincere condolences to the family of Professor Moyo, to the staff of the Harare based Africa Institute of Agrarian Studies that he founded and led for many years, and to the entire CODESRIA community, which was his extended family.

Ending his short but extremely productive journey in this world in India speaks volumes of Sam’s commitment to scholarship and to the cause of the peoples of the Global South.

Funeral arrangements (in Harare) will be announced in the next few days. Those whiling to send condolence messages or write tributes could send them by email to the following address: executive.secretary@codesria.snMay his soul rest in peace.

INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS ASSOCIATES (IDEAS), NEW DELHISam Moyo 23 September 1954- 22 November 2015

In deep sorrow we mourn the sudden and untimely death of Sam Moyo, profound scholar and progressive activist, beloved comrade, Member of the Executive Committee of IDEAs. Sam was in New Delhi, India to participate in a conference on “Labour Questions in the Global South” when a car he was travelling in was involved in a terrible accident. Two other friends and colleagues (Marcelo Rosa and Paris Yeros) were injured but Sam was very critically hurt. After a valiant struggle for survival, he passed away in the early hours of 22 November 2015.

Sam was much more than a guiding spirit in many of our activities. He illuminated our lives and work with his sharp intellect, passionate commitment, exemplary integrity and extraordinary energy. His strong sense of Pan African consciousness and wider South solidarity enriched his and our academic endeavour and public dissemination. His analytical insights always provided a fresh and penetrating perspective that enabled us to better understand the complexities of agrarian change and economic realities in Africa and elsewhere.

His death leaves a void that is impossible to fill. We will miss his warmth, affection, generosity and humour and of course his irresistible charm that could disarm the keenest adversary. In particular we will always cherish his ability to live life to the fullest, even in adverse circumstances. Our hearts go out to his family and his innumerable friends in Zimbabwe and across the world. For many of us, this cannot be farewell. A bit of Sam has enriched us forever and will live on inside us.

We hope to have more on Sam Moyo in the days ahead, to honour him and celebrate his extraordinary life. Please send your tributes, memories and other contributions to webmaster@networkideas.org and jayatijnu@gmail.com.IDEAs Team

On Saturday night at approximately 11:45pm Beijing time I received a call from an old friend informing me that Prof Sam Moyo had been involved in a high impact accident in New Delhi and we should pray. I didn’t. For some reason I just felt powerless and all I could do was sing songs of praise but could not sleep, then within the same hour the message came- Sam is no more. Shattered! I did not want to believe it. My or rather our world had just turned upside down. For we have always considered ourselves a privileged lot- the students of Prof Sam Moyo. Zvoradza!

I met Prof Sam Moyo first through his work in the late 1990s and then face to face way back in 2005 when I had just returned home having completed an MA in Development Studies in the UK. I had been asked by Ray Bush to pass greetings to him and the conversation that followed led to me joining the Africa Institute for Agrarian Studies (AIAS) initially on a three months contract which was eventually extended until 2009. From the first day I realized that Prof Sam -sorry most of us at the institute at that time and even now I supposed were never able to refer to him just as Sam- was a special breed- an international traveller sought after by many others- he was just not our Professor but he literally belonged to the Global South and he took it in his stride and never once complained about travel no matter how difficult or hectic a schedule. Many others have reflected about the man they knew as Sam and in this piece I will reflect in an eclectic manner on what he meant to me and the manner in which he influenced not only me but hopefully our generation of scholars/activists and practitioners. Let me just start off by stating the fact that he was an extra-ordinary scholar who had a larger than life presence who could not be restricted to a single subject or nation but was a global figure with local relevance. He was a giant of extra-ordinary energy and intellect that we all admired and wished to be like him at some point in our lives.

Prof Sam’s Contribution- beyond Just Land ReformHe was way ahead of his time in almost all his writings but let me state from the beginning that Prof’s lifetime of work cannot be adequately treated in these few paragraphs- all I am doing is providing highlights of what still stands out for me in his work (without referring to the texts). He did not see events or phenomena in isolation but instead saw connections with both the immediate past and also what other regions were experiencing. He recognised that the developing South was shaped mostly by policies and programs designed elsewhere and also continuation of the different forms of subjugation from land alienation to slave like labour regimes on commercial farms. As such he always remarked that Zimbabwe is mostly analysed in isolation from what has happening in other countries even her neighbours.

He made an important connection between economic policy and land reform. In his 2000 book Land Reform under Structural Adjustment he argued that ESAP in Zimbabwe had created incentives for large scale commercial farmers and also for diversification into other commercial land use patterns such as wildlife ranching, new export crops but had not adequately brought smallholders into these circuits of production and accumulation instead it had led to growing inequality. ESAP had also created a disincentive for land reform under the willing buyer willing seller model- given the fact that this was probably a period of boom for large scale agriculture thus there was no need to consider giving up land.

Whilst others were busy dismissing the land invasions as an isolated politically driven process he was the first to argue that there was a connection between the invasions of the 2000s and what we had experienced soon after independence all the way to the late 1990s- land invasions of differing intensity and he did not stop there he went to argue that there is a bigger connection between Zimbabwe’s land occupations with what was already happening in the Global South- it was indeed a moment of land occupations in places such as Brazil, India and even South Africa (see his Millennium 2001 article). His collaboration with Paris Yeros (2005) was seminal in many respects especially in bringing these connections to the fore. They also went a step further to demonstrate how the failure of the Structural Adjustment Project across the entire global South had yielded land occupations as the response of the marginalized peasantry. In fact their book on land occupations across the global South published in 2005 and the work of other peasant based movements such as the MST (Brazil), the LPM (South Africa) and war veterans + peasants (Zimbabwe) dramatically brought peasant politics back to the policy agenda. In the process Sam became one of the most sought after scholars in Global South capitals such as New Delhi, Sao Paulo, Mexico etc. and sadly he never received adequate attention in his own country- his work (and indeed that of the AIAS) only began to gain currency after Scoones et al had debunked the myths of collapse because of land reform- which Sam had raised earlier but no one had paid attention preferring instead to tag him as partisan. So sad.

Prof Sam was also very careful to avoid notions of silver bullet prescriptions- with regards to land he argued (in a paper co-authored with Prosper Matondi) that land was a necessary but not sufficient condition for effective rural development- instead there is need for broader agrarian reforms. Land reform (entailing redistribution, tenure reforms and improved utilisation) was only the first set of policy actions to be embarked upon. One of my favourite readings of Prof Sam Moyo is a small monograph published by Sapes Trust back in the 1990s entitled ‘Land and Democracy’. The purpose of land reform had mostly been reduced to addressing livelihoods and in this article he demonstrated how the resolution of the land question would on the one hand break the monopoly power of large scale commercial agriculture, broaden participation in the agrarian economy and in it allow for bottom-up participation within the rural political spaces.

Beyond an analysis of the distribution of land he also devoted significant energy towards an understanding of rural mobilization, power relations and also the social relations of production. He tracked mobilizations for land in terms of the material demands, the class category of those making those demands and contrary to what others have argued he did not seek to romanticize the peasantry but rather engaged critically in an effort to understand their agency so much so that when the 2000 land occupations happened Sam was the only one who could say I saw this coming.

Furthermore Prof Sam (at times working with others) contributed significantly towards our understanding of civil society broadly and NGOs in particular in Zimbabwe. He was very critical of NGOs especially when it came to the manner in which they engaged with land reform policy- which he thought was at the centre of the national question. But to his credit he did not give up on these formations. He volunteered his time to engage in presentations, training and being part of NGO based networks in order to help them improve their positioning and contribution towards land reform.

Sam did not shy away from controversy- he took on many of the so called agrarian experts from the Global North especially when they had made the error of declaring that the Agrarian Question had been resolved. This project was to take up most of his time and led to the establishment of the Journal of the Agrarian South and also was a recurring theme in what has perhaps become the flagship of the AIAS- the Agrarian Summer Institute. I take pride in the fact that Prof entrusted me with the responsibility of organising the very first of these way back in 2009 and I am glad to note it has grown in stature and has become an important platform for agrarian scholars.

On Effectiveness

Initial Observations- The Diary/CalendarOne of the finest aspects (among many others) about Prof Sam Moyo was his availability to everyone who sought his opinion, journalists, students, peers, government officials and the like but it had to be in his diary. Each morning the diary for the day would be prepared and sent and circulated to the managers within AIAS. You did not want to keep Prof waiting. It was Chinese like efficiency and fidelity to a system that has worked for him for years. If you were not on the diary- no matter who you are- forget it- no chance of meeting. By just looking at his diary you would understand the man’s mission on earth-it was great just to watch him work.

From 0 draft to 9th draftProf Sam was rigor personified. In my five years at the Institute I do not remember a document that did not go from 0 draft up to the 9th draft with him involved at every stage. I was initially infuriated at the pace at which we were producing our writings but eventually I also caught on. Many of us who were doing our PhD under his guidance (at times he would just volunteer to go through your thesis) benefitted a lot from this approach and he also used that time to reflect more on his work and some of the debates that were coming out. His presentations were another matter altogether- there were days when we could literally leave the office very late preparing his slides only for him to change the order or the entire presentation! His was a quick mind and you had to learn to follow as a student. He believed in over preparation there was no small platform for him.

Not only a Leader but a Developer of LeadersThere was no funding partner too big or too small for Prof and we all had to follow his example of professional courtesy, precise reporting, over delivery and also continuous engagement. Within the institute we were all students I observed Prof Moyo teach experts such as Finance Managers and Accountants how to do their jobs. He understood figures and made it easy even for us non-finance people to follow. I quickly came to the realization that working under Sam is an apprenticeship for bigger assignments to come. On his CV he stated that his mission was to train the next generation of scholars. There are many of us who passed through Sam’s hands that are now leading institutions and I am sure my colleagues at TrustAfrica are tired of me always making reference to how I was taught this and that by Prof Moyo. I was taught by the best.

A Man of Integrity and Selfless at all TimesProf lived by his word. He went beyond the call of duty. I remember at the height of inflation when we were losing several thousands of dollars because we were using the official rate of exchange Prof insisted that we had to abide by the law even if it hurts. Some of us had already devised a number of schemes to beat the system but Prof would have none of it. Whenever we had challenges with financial resources Prof was always the first to volunteer that we do not pay his salary which was already too low compared to his peers working elsewhere. To him it was not about money- if it was he would have secured another job just like that but this was deeper- it was a calling.

On His IndependenceProf Sam was a thinker and even without him saying it he cherished the freedom to write as he liked without the constraints of pleasing any form of authority. He was not anyone’s man. Many will recollect that he spurned the government’s offer of a cabinet position and even the offer of a farm at the height of land reform -although some of us tried to convince him to take it as part of the sustainability plans of AIAS- he would not budge. The famous statement was my ‘I am a scholar and not a politician or even a farmer’. When he left SARIPS he received many offers to lead regional offices of donor institutions but again he insisted on his being a scholar preferring instead to pour his savings into establishing the AIAS. His writings were non-partisan but instead driven by a deep sense of nationalism which was not subordinated to any political party. Although there were moments where his views seemed to agree with those of a political party he remained critical and carefully watching out for elite capture- he was his own man.

On IndustryProf Sam worked like he knew that his life on earth will be cut short. In terms of research outputs I do not know of anyone who can match his productivity. When we were preparing our individual annual reports Prof’s one always looked like a little booklets- listing his publications, conference papers he prepared and presented, students he mentored, interviews he gave. He always insisted that we all produce these individual annual reports to make sense of the rush of the previous year and plan better for the next year but we always ended up a bit embarrassed when we presented our 2-3 pagers compared to his 15-20 page reports. He never shied away from assignments and was always prepared to put in more hours than all of us. Anyone who worked with him knows fully well that hitting the midnight oil was part of the routine and not the exception.

AmbassadorProf Sam Moyo was one of Zimbabwe’s greatest ambassadors. I have had the privilege of travelling with Prof countless times into different cities and sharing platforms with him and he was never intimidated or retreated from his line on the need to understand Zimbabwe in a better way- i.e. the need to understand colonial redress, the need to guard against hyperbole when describing the crisis and stay focused on the real data and yes- he called out the sanctions as harming the economy. But he was realistic enough to note even earlier than others that Zimbabwe needed to normalize her relations with the international community. He was not as others claim an apologetic for the state – he was nationalist at heart and was more objective in analysing Zimbabwe (even the violence) but within a framework that was embedded in understanding the evolution of colonialism to neo-colonialism, the impact of centre-periphery relations and also the role of international economic development policies on developing countries such as Zimbabwe.

He did not only represent Zimbabwe- he also represented Africa (especially the community of scholars) and excelled at this on the international global stage. A sure ticket of being treated well in places like CLASCO, Third World Forum etc. was to name drop that you worked with Prof Sam!

On FamilyWorking at AIAS was fun! We were a small family of committed and upcoming scholars- I am sure nothing has changed there. Hardly two months would pass without Prof Sam finding a reason for all of us to gather together with his immediate family for a celebration of sorts. Oh he loved life! His favourite dish was pepper soup and most of the times he would prepare it and insist that everyone at least taste it.

More importantly for me Prof adored his daughters. I personally saw how his two young girls Qondi and Zandi were the only ones who could easily interrupt his schedule. On a recent trip where we travelled together (and sadly the last one) I asked about the girls he was proud that Sibongile is doing very well in the banking sector but maybe because he knew that I started working with him when Qondi and Zandi where in High School- he started telling me about their academic exploits and I had never seen him so proud. He asked about my 23 month old daughter and insisted that I visit No.96b so that he could see her – it was not to be because I procrastinated. Another instruction he gave me which I realize now were his parting words ‘…try to buy a house now’ so typical of a father.

On GenerosityProf Sam’s generosity knew no boundaries. Ever smiling- in that mischievous but also very disarming way. I can’t remember a time when he ever said no when we asked him for a consultation, to help us complete a task or when others came requesting technical support even without a budget for it. One of his assets which had taken a lifetime to accumulate has always been his friends from all over the world. They were not just people who he had met at a conference but these were his friends. He had a way of connecting and keeping in touch for life. Some of us got the opportunity to meet some of Prof’s close friends - Fred Hendricks, Lungisile, Issa Shivji, Adebayo Olukoshi, Dzodzi Tsikata, Mercia Adrews and the list goes on. He also had his own heroes and you could only beam with admiration as he spoke so glowingly of Archie Mafeje, Thandika Mkandawire, Issa Shivji and I suspect his best friend Praveen Jha. When I heard that he had been involved in an accident it struck me that his best protégé to date- Paris Yeros- would be with him and for sure- the two had become like brothers –in one light moment I called them Marx and Engels. Prof and Paris’ collaboration led to a number of important interventions which have significantly shaped the broad discourse on land and agrarian reform in the global South.

Prof enriched our lives in an immeasurable way. We have lost a caring father, a leader, a mentor, a friend and above all a fine human being.

Prof Sam Moyo- Gone Too Soon- Kamba Hahle. Lala ngoxolo.

Prof Wen Tiejun (Rural Reconstruction Movement, Beijing), in memory of Sam, in English and Chinese:

The first heavy snow in the winter of Beijing,With the heartbreaking chill,Came the message of the sudden death of my old friend, Sam Moyo.He seemed to be quietly leaving amidst the fleeting snowflakes…

Beijing, Chongqing, Hong Kong -- his traces were everywhere,Conference halls, villages, classrooms -- his voices echoed around,In my mind, I see his image active in different places in China,In my heart, I cherish his warm smiles and sharp views.

Sam Moyo has departed. Yet, he is still among us.

Phil O’Keefe

I knew Sam before Independence. I worked with him on land, energy and forestry issues. My abiding memory of him is his open, radical, good natured approach to life. He was a true geographer, driven by the empirical evidence that landscape meant lifescape and that lifescape was built by bias in race, class and gender. Not my judgement, but one of his doctoral examiners left the room after questioning Sam about his doctoral thesis, obviously on land in Zimbabwe. “It was like asking Bismark about his foreign policy” was the judgement. What a loss felt around the world.Phil O’Keefe. Newcastle, UK.

Mahmood Mamdani remembers his friend and comrade Sam Moyo

I no longer recall when exactly I met Sam. Maybe it was in the late 1970s at CODESRIA, or in the early 1980s at the Zimbabwe Institute of Development Studies. The late 1990s, though, was the time we truly got to work together, closely and intensely. The two of us were at the helm of CODESRIA’s leadership, as President and Vice President. The next two years were a time of deep and sharp differences in policy, and it often seemed as if there was no end in sight.

I remember a particularly difficult episode a year down the line. We had an emergency meeting in Dakar but Sam said he could not be there because he was to have a delicate operation in a few days. I explained what was at stake and asked if he could postpone the operation by a week. He warned me that he would not be able to sit for long in his current state. But the next day, he was in Dakar. During the meeting, he kept on shifting the weight of his body from one side to the other, now leaning on one buttock, then on another. He was obviously in great pain, but it never showed on his smiling face.

That was Sam, selfless, committed to a fault, totally reliable. He was the person you would want by your side if you expected hard times ahead. But no matter how difficult the times, as during those years, I never saw him turn vindictive against anyone. Later, we would look back on that period as something of a crossroads in the history of CODESRIA. Then, however, it was hard and painful. It was the kind of ordeal that can forge enduring friendships. Sam was that kind of a friend.

In those years, I also learnt that Sam was a mathematical genius. As soon as we would land in Dakar, he would head for the Accounts office, take charge of all the books, and go through them meticulously. No matter how long it took, 12 or 24 hours, Sam would work until he would have a report ready for discussion between the two of us. Soon, word went around that it would be foolhardy for anyone to try and pull a fast one on Sam.

Students and scholars came to CODESRIA for different reasons, some for the thrill of travel, others to be part of a Pan-African conversation on issues of the day, and yet others to access otherwise scarce resources for research. Sam shared all those motives but, above all, he was among the few who unfailingly gave more than he received. When it came to facing temptation or intimidation, his was a towering presence. Sam stood for integrity and steadfastness, a calm intelligence and a cool deliberation, a level head in a crisis situation, and a free spirit in a party that was sure to follow every difficult episode.

Sam was one of the few who presented a seamless blend of this capacity for sobriety, integrity and joy that marked the CODESRIA crowd – all with a cigarette in one hand no matter the time of day, and a glass of beer at the end of the day. The ground on which this companionship was nurtured was the city of Dakar. We came to it from different corners of the continent, all marginal in one way or another, all looking for freedom, most of all the freedom of expression, as if gasping for oxygen. Out of that common endeavor were born close associations and lasting comradries.

Sam’s major scholarship was in the field of agrarian studies. Always unassuming, he seldom talked of his own scholarly work unless someone raised it first. For me that occasion came in 2008 when the London Review of Books invited me to write a piece on Zimbabwe. The land reform was the big issue at the time. I pulled together whatever studies on the subject I could lay my hands on. Three sources stood above all others as original and reliable: one from the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex, another from the University of Western Cape and then Sam’s work at the African Institute of Agrarian Studies in Harare. As I read these sources, and the press reports on their findings, I learnt something about the politics of knowledge production and its recognition in the public sphere. Two facts were crystal clear to me: one, that Sam had been several steps ahead of the others; and, two, that his work was the last to be recognized. It was almost as if the press went by a rule of thumb: when it came to ideas, the chain had to originate in a Western university, and the link go through a South African institution, before it came to an African researcher.

I discussed this with Sam. He smiled, as if to say, what’s new? At home, his critics were at pains to paint him as partisan. If he showed that the land reform had improved the lot of a large number of the landless, those in the opposition discounted it as the claim of someone with the regime. But if he refused to give blanket support to the regime, those with it said he must have hidden links to the opposition. When it came to public policy, Sam took the cue from his research, always fearless, unafraid, and hopeful. He was a voice listened to by all, especially when he was the target of criticism. Whatever their disagreement, all knew that Sam was not susceptible to corruption, and that he would not offer an opinion unless it was informed by deep research.

The last time I saw Sam was at the CODESRIA General Assembly in Dakar in June. Only two months before, we had been together in the city of Hangzhou in China at a conference organized by the Inter-Asia School to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Bandung. The hospitality was overwhelming. Every meal was like a banquet; every plate on the table was renewed before it could be empty; wine and drinks flowed. Sam was relaxed, as he reminisced of our efforts to build CODESRIA over the past decades, and reflected about future plans for the African Institute of Agrarian Studies. I recall this as if it was yesterday: Sam, smiling, trusting, reassuring, strong, purposeful, and thoughtful, yet again doing what he was best at, charting a road none had travelled before, but at the same time taking you along.

This is one journey, dear Sam, that you take alone. You leave this world as you came into it, alone, but this world is a better place, and we are better off, because we had the privilege of being part of your world. The loss is great and the heart is heavy, and it is hard and painful to say good-bye. As we grieve for our loss, we also celebrate your life.

Farewell, dear friend, brother, and comrade.

A sip, a laugh, a legacy: Prof Sam MoyoMasego Madzwamuse

We sat down for a drink and to catch-up on work. We argued and discussed different projects Sam was busy with at the time. I ordered my usual gin and tonic and he asked for a savanna light; then as if to make it lighter, went on to dilute it with water. We looked at him perplexed and asked why on earth anyone would add water to savanna and his response was: ‘I am trying to watch my drink’. Without much debate this was understood by all who sat at the table that night. The subject was closed and we moved on to other pressing and exciting matters. The land question, agrarian reform in Zimbabwe, political transition and the land grabs dogging the continent.

What is but a small blot to a man’s image, especially one whose ideas had shaped your thinking for as far you could remember? Studying sociology I had become curious about the land question in Africa. In a conversation with my father, I had asked him about this. We are told the San are the oldest inhabitants of Southern Africa and yet in Gantsi my mother’s home area most of the San settlements were to be found on the outskirts of the budding town, on the fringes of national parks, the biggest cattle ranches in the country and so forth. And my father had said the San villages encircle the Gantsi Town, they are observing the movements of the new occupants of their land and one day they will reclaim what is theirs. There a curiosity was born; I wanted to understand how dispossession of this magnitude takes place and what leads to a state where injustice is really a normalisation of the abnormal. Under the guidance of my mentor and supervisor Dr Onalenna Selowane, I went about reading what I could get my hands on to learn about land, rights, politics, identity and social justice - and right up there were the works of Prof Sam Moyo.

You see Sam was a great thinker and fearless scholar. A political economist of note. At the height of the political crisis in Zimbabwe and the Fast Track Land Reform Programme or invasions if you wish, Sam was amongst the few scholars who acknowledged that land reform in Zimbabwe had benefitted small scale farmers, the rural poor. In his various writings he argued that the popular assumption about failed land reform in Zimbabwe was wrong. Instead, land reform programmes despite benefiting the elite had been redistributive. The poor had gained more than others and the extent of such benefit had been wide enough to trigger significant progressive changes in the agrarian structure.

To quote Prof Moyo writing about the land reform discourse in the early 2000s this is what he had to say;

“the debate has focused on the immediate political motives of the FTLRP, selectively highlighting its aspects of ‘violence’, ‘disorder’, and ‘chaos’, claiming that the ruling Zanu PF elite and the state instrumentalised the FTLRP for electoral support and that only Zanu PF cronies benefited. By neglecting to examine the character and scale of redistribution of the FTLRP, and not looking at it from a longer historical perspective, the literature on Zimbabwe’s agrarian reform is deprived of a crucial viewpoint”[1].

Prof Moyo drawing over three decades of research went about to set the record straight. This was a highly unpopular view but he stuck to it. Sadly enough it is the work of Ian Scoones that is often cited to tell the story of the success of the land reform in Zimbabwe and its impact on the lives of small-scale farmers. The New York Times even ran a story back in 2012 about the new black tobacco farmers, beneficiaries of the fast track land reform process – the title was ‘In Zimbabwe Land Takeover, a Golden Lining’[2] Sam Moyo did not glorify the fast track land programme though he also critiqued the land reform process and pointed out its flaws, acknowledging the uneven distribution of land among beneficiaries of the land reform programme. He acknowledged that some especially the political elite had received larger allocations than others. This in turn influenced skewed access to farming services and infrastructure. But that said, the bottom line was the peasants had benefitted. While the article in the NYT was celebrated, Scoones widely quoted, Prof Moyo received wide criticism for the same views. We don’t acknowledge and celebrate African scholarship enough. We second guess our own and often we are quick to label and discredit them.

The Agrarian Institute was born and Prof Sam Moyo’s legacy lives on

But that was Sam’s work on Zimbabwe. He dedicated his scholarship to other parts of the continent too. He was a Pan-Africanist of note. He served as the President of the Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA) from 2009–2011). He was a research professor at the Zimbabwe Institute of Development Studies, and taught at the Universities of Calabar in Nigeria as well as Zimbabwe and served on the boards of many organisations.

With most of his achievements what stood out for me was the African Institute of Agrarian Studies. Prof Moyo set up the Institute in late 2002. The main objective of taking on such a bold step was to influence land and agrarian reform policies through multidisciplinary social science research, policy dialogues, training and information. Sam never lost sight of one thing he was passionate about. This would not be an institute that would do research for the sake of it. He ultimately wanted to mobilise scholars to provide advice and mediate in the policy making processes so as to improve rural livelihoods. He often lamented the limited relevant knowledge and training programmes to tackle the contemporary agrarian crisis that is emerging in the continent. The low agricultural productivity, food insecurity, unemployment, poverty, and unsustainable natural resources utilisation, while redressing the growing loss of rights to land, food and a clean environment. To respond to this challenge, Prof Moyo argued that a critical mass of analysts and civil society advocates needs to be built to influence shifts in the policy environment. This should also promote civil society organisations to better support the advocacy of those whose rights are infringed upon. His argument was the current knowledge production and policy analysis institutions have, due to their limited disciplinary curricula failed to fill this gap. They serve too few potential agrarian analysts and focus on limited market and business models. Their learning processes cater for a narrow range of views and exclude the perspectives of those who use political economy and rights-based approaches to policy making and advocacy.

Out of this critique, the Agrarian Institute was born and its flagship programme the Agrarian Summer School was launched. The Summer School contributes to filling this gap by providing training to postgraduate students and civil society activists in Africa, and promoting research relevant to understanding and addressing agrarian justice and inequitable resource rights on the continent. This programme was a reflection of Sam’s commitment to building skills for critical thinking and mentoring young scholars. He drew on his social capital to bring together some of the best brains in the field who spent days of their time teaching young scholars and providing them with feedback on their research. Guest lecturers have included the likes of Prof Paris Yeros University Federal do ABC Brazil, Prof Dzodzi Tsikaka University of Ghana and current President of Codesria, Praveen Jha and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi among others. Partners in the Agrarian Consortium that emerged out of these efforts include the Rhodes University, Haki Ardhi, University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and Civil Society Organizations, HAKIARDHI The Land Rights Research & Resources Institute (Tanzania), and Trust for Community Outreach and Education (South Africa) and other in research and training of postgraduate students, with the support of key research institutions in Brasil (Federal Universities of ABC and Brasilia) and in India (Jahwaral Nehru University Centre for Economic Studies and Planning). The Agrarian Summer School is widely recognised in the region and internationally, there is growing demand within the Global South for participation in it. Many who have been through his hands have gone off to do great things.

The last time I saw Sam was in August and over a glass of wine, lots of laughter and this time nothing was diluted, we plunged straight into another heated debate over a highly political and controversial issue. That of Cecil the lion. That evening many questions were asked, whose narrative is it? What was the impact of the international campaign on the livelihoods of rural communities who rely on tourism and sustainable use of wildlife resources for their local economies? Where was the voice of the African scholars and practitioners in the conservation field? What do communities have to say, where is the platform? The questions went on and on. That was Sam; there was laughter, sipping and critical thinking.

Sam you are one of whom it can be said that “ akekho ofana nawe” (there is none like you). Rest in eternal peace dear brother, colleague, mentor and comrade!!! You planted many ideas and these will live on!

The passing on of Professor Sam Moyo of the African Institute for Agrarian Studies (AIAS) touched me wholeheartedly because he plucked me from a navy undergraduate class of the Geography Department at the University of Zimbabwe in 1993. I was to work with him until July 2003, when I left for Brown University on a fellowship on environment and development. Over the years, I have touched base with his work, and in 2014 we started working on a land project, until the time of his death in a freak accident in India. This was just after we had a meeting two weeks ago. I would say that I was perhaps the longest serving student and research assistant of Professor Sam Moyo, and many who know me, associates me with the family for good reasons as I literary had my foundational career at his house during weekdays and over weekends throughout the important peak years of his career with a growing family of Sibo, Sam, Zandi and Qondi. They became like sisters to me and I am glad to have been part of his journey.

I first wrote my undergraduate project in 1993 supervised by Sam titled “Environmental Quality of Residential Areas: the Case of Chikonohono High Density Area in Chinhoyi”. As a young honours student, I did not even have a modicum of an idea that the man supervising my project was actually a land and agrarian reform “guru” then. I came up with a flying and an exemplary project in the Department of Geography. At that time, Sam had been involved with environmental related issues having coauthored several books: with Peter Robinson, Yemi Katerere, Stevenson and Davison Gumbo, “Zimbabwe’s Environmental Dilemma: Balancing Resources Inequities”, Published by ZERO, 1991; with Neil Middleton and Phil O’Keefe, “Tears of the Crocodile: from Rio to Reality in the developing World” (1993), followed by Moyo S, O’Keefe P, and Sill M, The Southern African Environment: Profiles of SADC Countries, London: Earthscan, 1993. These books shaped my decision to undertake my MSc research on land degradation in Zimbabwe through unearthing the dilemma of population pressure in Chiweshe communal areas in Mashonaland central, titled “The Active Policy Support Role of NonGovernmental Organisations in addressing Land Degradation” (Apparently Sam was also writing furiously on the role of NGOs in development with a book published with John Makumbe and others. The basic argument he proffered being that NGOs are weak, do patch work and afraid to advocate addressing fundamental development questions that were colonially constructed through unequal land ownership). Little did I know that in my conceptualisation and dictionary the language of Sam and the writing with his peers began to dominate my own work. Yet, underneath the topics I chose, rhymed with Sam’s own work and deep intellectual engagement with the land question in Zimbabwe.

Sam was pushy academically and highly demanding of his students, and worse for his research assistant. On completion of my MSc in 1995, I became a fulltime research assistant, and was thrust to colead a project on the impact of the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) on agriculture. The environmental related issues that I was passionate about became secondary to land and agrarian studies. Yet, in reality Sam had been carefully nurturing me towards a subject that was the passion of his heart. After raising resources from the Ford Foundation for the project, he then left IDS for the former Southern Africa Regional Institute for Policy Studies (SARIPS) of the Southern Africa Political Economy Series (SAPES) Trust in 1995. By then, he had become an associate Professor in 1994, yet had not completed his Doctor of Philosophy. As a research assistant, I was given a huge file to read, and little did I know that this was the ground breaking work of Sam, as it was his draft PhD thesis which he later submitted to the University of Northumbria, in New Castle Upon Tyne. I remember literary doing a cut and paste job using glue and scissors at the back library/office at No. 96 A, Borrowdale Road, which had become my home. It is upon this thesis, that the ground breaking “Zimbabwe’s land Question” was published by Sapes Trust in 1995, at the same time he obtained his PhD and moved to the SARIPS. He left his work happy that he had his research assistant to lead the ESAP research work in Shamva district in Mashonaland Central. I took responsibility for the project until 1997, when I then moved to join SARIPS as his research assistant.

By then I was the longest serving research assistant. For many years, colleagues of his, at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Zimbabwe, jokingly used to make fun of me, by saying “when I grow up, I want to be Sam Moyo’s Research Assistant”. Yet in leading a major project with eminent scholars at IDS, showed the depth in which Sam trusted me by thrusting me among his colleagues. I believe, I equally delivered for the ESAP project was outstanding in terms of its depth as I spent 3 years on the ground in Shamva with many students who came in, as I sought additional research assistance. Some of these are today outstanding academics in their own right including Dr Petronella Chaminuka at the Agricultural Research Council in South Africa, Prof. Edward Mabaya at Cornell, Dr Nelson Marongwe a good friend of mine who then was seconded by Sam to ZERO where Sam was the Chairperson of the board. I badly wanted a permanent job then, and thought Sam would second me there as well. Apparently, he had already made up his mind that I had to join him at SARIPS as a research assistant. When I did in 1997, Sam’s eldest daughter, Sibo and friends had just completed at Africa University in Mutare. Sam badly wanted Sibo to follow his path, but she had other ideas and did not, which meant I remained as the research assistant.

Yet, Sam also felt sympathetic towards me and encouraged that I develop further my education based on topics of my choice and not his own areas of work. Sam had outstanding individual books by then, and Nelson Marongwe, Edward Mabaya and myself contributed immensely to the book on “Land Reform and Structural Adjustment”, published in 2000. This was a master class, and I am pleased to have contributed to the collection of the data at his guidance, as an addition to the data collected during my three years at IDS. I began to slowly pick areas of my interest surrounding water resources (horticulture) in relation to land reform, of which I wrote several proposals that Sam tore apart and said “At PhD level, this is not worth my time to read”. I was never deterred, because with the condemned proposals, I was able to secure PhD places at New Castle University and University of West Virginia. The breakthrough came when I was selected as candidate to join the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Uppsala, Sweden.

In between, there were life-changing experiences for me, a rural boy when for the first time, Sam recommended me for a three months visit to the United States of America (USA) in 1996. I flew the beloved Air Zimbabwe for the first time, through Cyprus, to Washington, Chicago and Salt Lake City taking close to 2 days in planes. This opened me to new people, cultures, environments, when visiting the Indian reservations in Arizona, bureaucrats in Utah, the boat ride in Lake Powell, engagements on agriculture and environment issues in Kentucky in USA, and visiting small farms, coal mining areas, and a visit to the citadel of federal policy making in Washington DC. The visit that I contextualised in my Zimbabwe environment was personally defining and brought me to terms with policy making, land planning, environmental issues and why to me the land question was fundamental in Zimbabwe’s context. I felt more strongly that inequities in land ownership shaped by race were something that needed to be extinguished, and these were also Sam’s beliefs. But more importantly, he believed that this could be achieved through peaceful means, but also underpinned by radicalism in civil society and in Zimbabwean politics. In the Indian reservations, I got to understand better that the rights to land from a cultural and developmental standpoint was sacrosanct. I realised that the world over land was a defining resource for ordinary people, and therefore Zimbabwe was no different. Of course, Sam’s idea was not just talking by allowing me as a research assistant to see and talk to others. Yes, I did see and for sure this shaped my PhD training, after Sam had connected me to one of his best friends, Professor Kjell Havnevik who was to become my primary supervisor.

The mentorship I received from Sam made me a different person, the education also attributed to Kjell, who became a friend for almost 15 years has shaped who I am, how I relate to others at my work place, nationally and internationally. My decision to establish Ruzivo Trust in 2009, was clearly marked by a variety of events and processes, as well as my never die attitude in wanting to have good knowledge and “science with sensibility” with rigor. In addition, the foundation that Sam created in me, was to continue with a new agrarian and now development Professor and activist (Mandivamba Rukuni) who came into my life in 2005. I must admit, I was deeply stretched to levels never expected. It is almost 10 years of working on land related matters, which means that I have had a combined 35 years of deep mentorship that has created who I am, but has made me an “icon” in the minds of others in understanding the Zimbabwe land, livelihoods and general rural development issues. I have had the in’s at outside’s, from a local, national and international perspective on these questions thanks to Sam.

I missed the land donor conference in 1998, as I was in Sweden for my PhD and Sam would regularly bounce reports for me to review as he was central to the land reform programme. When the Land Reform and Resettlement Programme Phase II, was successfully produced amidst the land occupations in the Svosve area, with government controlling them I had hope. Sam then joined a team commissioned by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) to draft a land policy for Zimbabwe. Professor Issa Shivji, Professor Welshman Ncube and Dr Dereck Gunby were central in producing an outstanding report. Based on this report, I joined the team on my return for my PhD field work, and was involved under Sam’s leadership in the drafting of the Inception Phase Framework Plan (IPFP) that we widely consulted on in 1999. The constitution making exercise, the political pressure from Civil Society Organisations led by the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) that yielded the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) was a breaking point. Sam ran around across the interest groups, and hardly did we sleep. He wrote a paper for War Veterans who had organised their own conference, which he titled “Over promise and under delivery” which showed what government and Zimbabwe had not adequately done for them. At the same time, the constitutional dialogue series commenced at the Cresta Jameson Hotel, and Sam was one of the first presenters on the “land question” to which Dr Pearson Nherera at the Law School, University of Zimbabwe asked “Is there a land question or questions? And what is the land question answer!”, which pointed out that land issues were no longer just land issues but needed to be examined in a multifaceted way and in political terms.

Sam’s methods were methodological I must admit. While I always refer my students to the classical work of, “Zimbabwe’s land question” (1995), there are other attributes of his style that made me want to work with him. His ability to take data and analyse was the finest I experienced. If I may trace back: the Fast Track is historical, no doubt. Yet, when the Land Acquisition Act was enacted in the early 1990s, and gazetting of farms introduced, Sam took the list and analysed in different dimensions (what land was gazetted, where it was located, how it was used, what were the production trends etc); again with the allocations and noise of the Commercial Farm Settlement Scheme (CFSS), we also had the list and analysed methodologically. Such was Sam that when the list of 1471 farms was published in 1997 for gazetting in the press, we got busy at work and Sam wrote an outstanding monograph “The Land Acquisition Process in Zimbabwe 1997/8: SocioEconomic and Political Impacts’. This became his style of analysis that went beyond emotions to show the trends and implications of the actions of government. I inherited this trait in the subsequent books that I have written and published, and was defining in my PhD thesis he cosupervised “The Struggle for Access to Land and Water Resources in Zimbabwe: The Case of Shamva District”, Doctoral Thesis, Department of Rural Development Studies, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden.

Land reform negotiations at SARIPS were a spectacle for me, because I was the note taker for the Fast Track internal negotiations. For the first time, I came into contact with the ‘who is who’ of land issues. Ranging from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Resettlement, principally then Permanent Secretary, Dr Vincent Hungwe, and the Agricultural Rural Development firebrand then, Dr Joseph Made, negotiating with a team of the Commercial Farmers Union (CFU) led by Dr David Hasluck, while several ministerial officials were part of the several meetings in 2000. While I was struggling with my PhD data collection, I had to be involved in these negotiations according to Sam for historical record. Yet, Dr Hungwe seeing me, just as a youngman, would at times take me for lunch at the Portugal Restaurant, the Pointe, to get away from the shouting and singing during the negotiations on the Fast Track Land Reform Programme. However, a decision to break ranks of the chiefs negotiators was clear to me, despite spirited attempts by Sam to get the parties to negotiate and allow for consideration of the interests of all parties. We wrote a summary of the outcomes in a paper, that over years we called between ourselves “the Mbeki paper on land reform” that summarised the differences between the executive, large scale farmers and views of black farmers (as represented by their unions). The trips to London led by the Foreign Affairs Minister Mudenge then and with the late John Landa Nkomo, to me was a lost cause, because on the ground Fast Track was spreading like veld fire, while politics was juggled much to the disappointment of Sam. When I left for Sweden, my last assignment was to help formulate the Zimbabwe Joint Resettlement Initiative (ZIJIRI), as the last chance that Sam saw as a necessity to get concessions from the CFU and government, but it was too late as Fast Track became a reality.

When I go back again to my history with Sam, I clearly am left speechless, because at SARIPS I had to endure in and out, and I had to witness friends (Sam and Ibbo) working together and fighting friendship battles. This disappointed me, yet I remained committed to my work, with SARIPS of Sapes Trust (one in two) being uniquely outstanding institutions in southern Africa, with Sam producing outstanding policy analysts. Throughout my PhD training Sweden, I was connected to Sam’s work at SARIPS and I was heart broken when Sam left after acrimonious circumstances that were vague to me. I graduated on 26 November 2001, and packed my bags for Harare the same week. In announcing my presence, I met Sam at his house and could see a sparkle, new energy and drive. The first task, now as a Doctor, was to arrange Sam’s papers and books that were all over in his house. This was my professor and mentor, and who was I but just a child that Sam still saw in me to refuse! I reorganised all the books and papers in the “office” (One bedroom turned to a library, we facilitated the hiring of a carpenter to do shelving, and we got old desks from Blessing Musariri, daughter to famous Musariri farmer of Chegutu district), cabin and garage. In January of 2002, we were to start serious work, and of course I had no job then and knew I had reverted back to my research assistant job again, now as a PhD holder.

Yet, Sam now gave me more responsibilities to reorganise his professional life, while he continued writing. We appealed to friends in Zimbabwe and beyond for work to do for them, at a payment of course – what you may read as consultancies! It worked, because the National Economic Consultative Forum (NECF) through the core chairs, Drs Robbie Mupawose and Misheck Sibanda now Chief Secretary to Cabinet asked us to work on an expert database. Later, we had the Ford Foundation once again coming on board with small grants, as well as the National Land Committee of South Africa when land reforms in South Africa were almost taking up the Zimbabwe style. Sam wanted to form an institution that would be responsive, and on many occasions we had different names. He had his mind on a “Global Land Reform Institute”, and in 2002, I went to a seminar in Washington DC under this name. When I came back, I said it does not work best for us, and we had to rethink. Our good friend at Ford Foundation, Dr James Murombedzi concurred, and we then had to Africanise the institution we were to form. Yet, we were not in a hurry because the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) consumed our time, and I had to organise a parallel land reform workshop that was highly successful, least because Zimbabwe’s land reform and its international dimension was at its peak then. We had scored our first success, and all was due to Sam’s foresight, and my humble actioning of that foresight through practical delivery.

When we returned to Harare, we had made up our minds that we were to call the new outfit, the African Institute for Agrarian Studies (AIAS). I had to tinker around the making of the logos to truly reflect our thinking then, and the colors that rhymed with Sam and me, of simplicity and modesty. Yet, at that stage we were very ambitious, because we still wanted to reach to all of Africa. We sat down together to think about how best to run and institutionalise the project in Africa. Naturally we registered under the Companies Act in South Africa. We identified focal

persons in West Africa (Kojo Amanor at the University of Ghana) and in Kenya (Michael Odhiambo who was involved with the land alliance). We created a database of African scholars (Dr Karuti Kanyinga in Kenya, Issa Shivji, Adebayo Olukoshi, Paris Yeros, Thandika Mkandawire, and so many others). I lived in a world of Sam’s marxist scholarship, that I searched furiously for his Master’s thesis which was agricultural innovation and adaptation. Yet the man breathed Marxism through and through. I was accustomed to scholarship of class and agrarian accumulation, labour, etc. yet, when I listened to a deep exchange between Archie Mafeje and Sam, I was left confused. Archie disagreed with Sam's views on generic agrari-an questions in parts of Africa. An example bring that countries such as South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe as former settler colonies had 'a land question' than 'agrarian' one. Yet others such as Zambia had more of agrarian question because Archie claimed they had enough land, but suffered lack of agricultural support.

In 2002, Sam and myself helped in the technical work of the “Buka audit”, which was not published. This was followed by the Utete Committee, and we were asked to provide technical backup. This we did with utmost responsibility for our country, and also Sam still believing that land negotiations were still possible. I also believed the same, and we did put our minds on any task that we felt strongly was essential for our country. Still I could read Sam when he wrote in 2005 “…..the political signals for outright reengagement have not been issued by either the ‘west’ or the Zimbabwe state, given that the challenge of resolving the outstanding differences over ‘governance’ issues remains. Recent economic lapses, inflation and shortages of key goods also heightened a dirigiste intervention by the GoZ to establish economic order and state authority over social and economic actors, leading to negative social effects. This undermines normalisation” (Sam Moyo, Zimbabwe’s crisis and normalization, AIAS, unpublished paper, 2005). Yet Sam truly believed that there must be a congregation of thinking on land and agrarian reform issues and its global understanding. To this effect, Sam was adept in his networking, and I marvelled at how it was easy for him to make friends in the academic community

Sam knew that he was destined to build the “SAM MOYO” global brand, by reaching out to Latin America with CLACSO, Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in the Hague, North America, and Asia. Hardly did he talk of the Middle East in our conversations, and I am sure he had friends there too. What was remarkable was his ability to also forge African and Africanist scholars towards a subject dear to him. When he became President of CODESRIA, I was not surprised, because he had wide continental support in the academic community. At the same time, Sam had charisma and style to persuade, and command audiences with such a powerful voice backed by well argued papers.

The work of AIAS had taken roots, and funding partners such as the WK Kellogg Foundation, the Norwegians, Canadians were all coming on board. I recruited the first staff members of AIAS, assisted ably by Mrs Sithembile Chiromo who had left Sapes then. My first recruit was Lydia Nyagura as secretary supported by late David Chibanda, who was Sam’s and the children’s driver for many years. Mai Meyi was outstanding in the kitchen with preparations of Ghananian food that she had learnt from Dede. Many more staff members came in, such as Godfrey Mandinde in Finance, Blessing Musariri as an assistant, and students such as Nyasha Tirivayi, Ndabezihle Nyoni, Walter Chambati. I saw Dr Tendai Murisa now and here, who was to join later the AIAS and now heads TrustAfrica in Senegal. This was in addition to technical backstopping provided by external experts such as Dr Chrispen Sukume, Dr Innocent Matshe, Ishmael Sunga, Elizabeth Gwata, Langton Mukwereza, Dr Emmanuel Manzungu, Reneth Mano, Dr Lovemore Rugube, Dr Johannes M. Makadho and Walter Chambati.

I even had forgotten that in 2002, when we started, Sam could not pay me and my wife laughed when after six months of no pay, Sam paid me with his Landrover Discovery. We cried at home with joy at how Sam was modest to part away with a car he loved, yet to him material things mattered very little. Nonetheless, I had to pay back and one day he asked me to replace the car! With his own money of course, but I was to undertake a journey to Johannesburg to buy a Landcruiser for him. Mrs Chiromo drove me to Beitbridge, and I hitchhiked to Polokwane and was picked by Sam’s cousin Themba Maluleke. The first question he asked “But I told Sam to wait, and why would he make you hitchhike?”. We drove to Johannesburg and a new friendship was created. What I did not realise, which Sam did not know was that Themba had not done much in looking for his car. I stayed for two weeks, and I brought the car home to Sam. I was happy to do this for my mentor, without prejudice.

With all this history on the 31st of July 2003, I made a painful decision borne on the realisation that I had done much for Sam. The AIAS had acquired a rented office, that Patricia Kasiyamhuru had helped search and I decided that I would not be in that office. I said goodbye to Sam in a painful way to him and myself. I knew that at the bottom of my heart AIAS was now standing with a home and good salaries for staff. Yet to me, I was not going to occupy the office, because I had decided on personal development individually. I didn’t have a job to go to, and I went under the knife, surgery at West End clinic for removal of tonsils on the 31th of July after submitting, rather cowardly writing a 15page letter than directly telling him. I left the 15page resignation letter on Sam’s other favourite dining room table because I knew I could not stand up to say so in his face, I feared him. I had the surgery, and who showed up first as a visitor? Of course Sam. This shocked me because I thought what I had done was improper, for I did not even tell my wife. The question in my warped mind was that “ooh! Perhaps I will not wake up, but I was gone away from Sam”. We tried to negotiate over some months, and I explained my decision that all my life had been with him and I needed to test my capabilities alone in the world. I got a fellowship of 6 months at Brown University, in Rhode Island, which gave me a fresh impetus to restart a new life and completed outstanding reports for Sam.

I then disengaged, because I could not proceed coherently in my new life while engaging with Sam and his work. Each time I saw him, there was understandable disappointment. Yet, from 2004 I picked the pieces, worked on land reform from home, joined Dr Mabel Hungwe to form the Centre for Rural Development (CRD) at the University of Zimbabwe in 2005, and broadened my rural development work. I was an able academic in many ways, attracting new networks, people, friends and communities. I started enjoying working in rural communities, in communal areas, resettlement areas across the country and showing leadership to other young people. While I continued my land research work, I put more effort in knowing Zimbabwean people and their vision of a country, and explored different models of rural development until 2008. The CRD closed, and I formed Ruzivo Trust, and I thank Sam for giving me the confidence to be a founder of an organisation. When I reflect, its formation was long overdue because we got the confidence of society (donors, government, young and old scholars) and local communities accepted us on the ground where we work. I then met Sam in 2009, as part of a team constituted to help the Ministry of Lands and Rural Resettlement for a retreat. This was a nice reengagement and the retreat of the officials led by former Minister Herbert Murerwa and Permanent Secretary, Sohpia Tsvakwi was frank in Kariba. The retreat shaped my continued involvement with government and interest groups. Yet, my inclination towards livelihoods work continued.

Coming back to his writing style, Sam never used “I” or used “we” selectively. He did not personalise issues that he wrote on, and remained focused on making academic sense and for readers to have comfort in what he wrote. This was no mean task, because the urge to say “I” on land issues that draws emotions was very high. This to me reflected Sam’s humility. Just a couple of months ago, I gatecrashed Sam’s AIAS workshop at the Crown Plaza organised jountly with the Archie Mafeje Institute at UNISA. Thanks to Sabelo NdlovuNgatsheni for alerting me. As a serial workshop gatecrusher, I was asked to present a key note address because one of the key note presenters was not there. I recited my relationship with Sam and Archie Mafeje in brief, a history that many of the participants were not aware of. Later that week, I went to the office verandah at 96B Borrowdale to meet Sam and ask pertinent questions on Zimbabwe’s future and what we could do to make this great nation a better place. An expected one hour interview ended up taking four hours, because it became more of retracing our history. Sam felt that he was not acknowledged enough and I knew this personal view for many years. Yes indeed, I agreed with him, given that he had perhaps played a significant role than anyone else in pushing for the land agenda in Zimbabwe, tried to facilitate negotiation for its resolution. I know that we perhaps underestimated his contributions and he died disappointed that land should have delivered more joy and happiness than fracturing society. He always consistently said that we have to move beyond the acrimonious history and find each other without emotions of victims and victors. At the AIAS Crown Plaza workshop during tea time, I told young academics that we have to write to honour our great academics, my thinking then was on Sam and Mandivamba Rukuni. These are great minds that have contributed to academia, to Zimbabwe’s agrarian development and where global scholars of the highest order.

Now, we have to reflect without one of them – Sam. It hurts. Nevertheless, we still have a job to do, and I for one am going to fight for a book in his honour. Other books must follow of living legends Mandi, Yemi Katerere, Ibbo Mandaza, and others who may not be recognised easily in the public domain. I enjoyed my research assistant work although it was not an easy job, given Sam’s high academic expectations. However, through it, Sam taught me hard work, discipline and persistence. Today I conduct myself and strive to practice at the highest level of academic engagement, as Sam would have expected from me. To me Sam was a professional at heart, by experience, dedication, and commitment to land and agrarian issues. You were a fountain of knowledge and a man of academic brilliance who contributed immensely to Zimbabwe’s land question. The Zimbabwean academic community, especially those he interacted with and the many he mentored, particularly myself, feel robbed and saddened by the death of a man who contributed so much to the academic world. I feel for Sam’s daughters, DedeEsi AmanorWilks, Beatrice Mutetwa and other family members who have lost a most loved one. They not only have lost a father and a friend, but also a social builder with easy and simplicity. His passing has left a deep vacuum on the Zimbabwean and international community. Professor Moyo may have physically departed but his legacy shall live on.

Prosper B. Matondi Harare, Zimbabwe 26 November, 2015

Oliver Mtapuri

Thank you for putting together today’s seminar in remembrance of Prof Sam Moyo, which I hope will culminate in a series of seminars in his memory going forward.

From the time I joined Government in 1990 to the time I resigned in 2003, as Deputy Chief Research Officer in the Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare responsible for Labour Surveys and Statistics and Social Dialogue, we used to consult Prof Sam Moyo from the inception of the Land Reform Programme. I spearheaded the first Farmworkers Survey whose results were presented at the first Donors’ Conference on Land Reform in Zimbabwe. My Department was a creation of Prof Ibbo Mandaza when he joined Government at Independence. I think Prof Lloyd Sachikonye was part of this pioneering group in the Department until he joined the Zimbabwe Institute of Development Studies (ZIDS) at the University of Zimbabwe. I joined when they all had already left the Department. During the Economic Structural Adjustment Pogramme we consulted extensively these scholars as Government. I was a member of the Secretariat of the Tripartite Negotiating Forum (an interface between Government, Labour and the Private Sector). For two years, as a member of the Secretariat I used to commute between my office and SAPES consulting these scholars in my official capacity. When the Southern Africa Regional Institute for Policy Studies was formed, we gave them a good number of civil servants to train supported by the Government of Zimbabwe. I could have had been one of Prof Sam Moyo’s students had I opted for a Masters in Policy Studies. I instead opted for an MBA which I undertook also with the support of the Government of Zimbabwe at the University of Zimbabwe. I once had an informal chat with Prof Sam Moyo during those days about his prognosis about Land and Agrarian Reform in Zimbabwe and the rest of the continent. He showed me a 250 page draft manuscript on Land and Agrarian Reform which did not have any citations or references – this was him writing in his own words how he felt Land and Agrarian Reform show unfold. By not citing others, this showed his ‘scholarly arrogance’ and a reflection of his passion in the subject area, untainted, pure in his own way. (I am not sure whether that piece was ever published or not). That is how I remember Prof Sam Moyo, a very humble scholar, who inspired hope in his scholars, unassuming, thought-provoking, a critical thinker and most of all, a humble servant of the peasantry whose struggle was one of his major foci. All I can say, ‘I could have been one of your scholars Prof’.

The Thabo Mbeki Foundation extended its “heartfelt condolences” following the death Professor Sam Moyo‚ who “resisted the temptation to serve as a mouthpiece and propagandist for established and dominant social groups”.Moyo‚ who “is credited for his sustained research on land and agrarian reform in Zimbabwe”‚ died in a vehicle accident on Sunday in New Delhi.

“Those who have had the privilege to work with Moyo attest to his deep intellectual insight‚ his generosity of spirit and loyalty to the cause of the emancipation of the ordinary African masses‚” the foundation said.

“In addition to his humility‚ Moyo commanded respect because of the quality of his work and the honesty and integrity of the output. He resisted the temptation to serve as a mouthpiece and propagandist for established and dominant social groups.”

“The academic community on the continent is challenged to reflect on the obligation it has to produce more and more Professor Moyos‚” the foundation said.

The unforgettable Sam ‘Mudzanga’Conway Tutani 27 November 2015

Professor Sam Moyo reached the pinnacle of academia and stayed true to his vocation to the end.

As teenagers, we used to good-humouredly call him Sam ‘Mudzanga’ (because of his new-found love for smoking, “mudzanga” being the Shona word for cigarette) or Sam Kanhunzi (because of the dark mole by his nose which stood out in contrast to his very light complexion, “kanhunzi” being a small housefly or domestic fly). He was born with more than enough charisma, but he remained down-to-earth as he rose higher and higher.

Moyo was neither an Afro-pessimist with a colonial mentality hankering after servitude like a house nigger nor a hopeless optimist as to blind himself to the post-independence failings and evils like oppression and corruption. Moyo’s colleague Professor Ian Scoones encapsulated this in an obituary he wrote this week: “Sam has often been inaccurately pigeonholed as being on ‘one’ side or another . . . Whether inside the State and the party (Zanu PF), among opposition groups or with the World Bank and other donors, no one could ignore what Sam had to say.”

His free academic spirit could not be shackled by ideology and this made him “challenge oppression and exploitation in whatever form”.

Moyo did not erect barriers, but built bridges. He interacted with all sides — from the ruling party to various opposition formations.

Moyo, true to academia, adhered to highest standards of scientific analysis, earning himself a global reputation as an eminent scholar bringing real value to humankind.

The People's Democratic Party (PDP) has learnt with shock and sadness the untimely death of Professor Sam Moyo, the director of African Institute of Agrarian Studies (AIAS), a leading academic, researcher and a giant in agrarian studies.

Professor Moyo died tragically last week when he was involved in a motor vehicle accident in India where he was attending a conference. Like a dedicated fighter in his profession, he died in the battlefield advancing the frontiers of knowledge.

The late Professor Moyo was a passionate pan-Africanist whose goal was for the people of Zimbabwe to achieve social and economic justice; and that there was fair and equitable distribution of land in the country.

He was widely respected academic in Zimbabwe, Africa and globally; and became a world acclaimed authoritative voice on agrarian issues. Professor Moyo is the founder member and director of AIAS whose aim is to provide objective policy analysis on agrarian issues backed by solid research. The centre has been able to train researchers, graduate students, policy analysts and activists in agrarian issues.

He was an academic who was totally against the primitive accumulation of land by the Zanu PF regime and his vision was to see that the land distribution exercise totally benefitted the country's citizens through its productive use.

It is regrettable that he died when some of his goals such as the equitable distribution of land were yet to be meant. The much awaited government land audit exercise is still to be undertaken while the government continues to compulsorily acquire land from productive farmers thereby disrupting agricultural production in some areas.

The land issue was the core of the liberation struggle and it is unfortunate that Professor Moyo died when there is yet to be closure on the issue through a democratic and participatory process aimed at equitable, transparent, just, lawful and economically efficient distribution and use of land.

The PDP we want to ensure the following; the setting up of an independent Land Commission, as provided for in the Constitution, restoration of collateral security in land, to facilitate sustainable funding of the agricultural sector, granting title to existing farmers, deracialising land ownership and the elimination of multiple land ownership through a land audit.

As the PDP, we console the Moyo family, Professor Moyo colleagues, his students, the people of Zimbabwe and the international community as we say goodbye to Professor Moyo.

May his soul rest in peace!!!

BLF PAYS TRIBUTE TO PROFESSOR SAM MOYO: HAMBA KAHLE SON OF THE SOIL!

The Black First Land First (BLF) movement shares the grief of the Zimbabwean people on the loss of their beloved son and African revolutionary, Professor Sam Moyo. We learn with heavy hearts from our occupied country, South Africa, that Prof Moyo has passed on from this world.

We share the pain of the world peasants, landless and anti-imperialist community. This loss comes at a time when our world is again in the grip of imperial and colonial aggression and mendacity. In a world saturated with lies, revolutionary intellectual work becomes part of the most important arsenal of the battle for liberation of the oppressed.

We shall forever remember how Prof Moyo stood as a beacon of truth and principle in a sea of sponsored condemnation of the Zimbabwean land struggle. Imperialist propaganda went into overdrive trying to soil the heroic acts of the Zimbabwean people and their government to return the stolen land.

Prof Moyo rejected acclaim and acknowledgement that comes from colonial and imperial scholarship that implores Africans to take the side of Empire against its people. We watched with great admiration how, from every conference, from pages of rarefied academic journals and in books, Prof Moyo again and again defended the Zimbabwean land reclamation struggle.

We will always remember that there was a time when Prof Moyo stood alone with the revolutionary people of Zimbabwe. In international academic platforms he refused the seductive embrace of colonisers which comes with a litany of personal rewards.

We learned from Prof Moyo’s example that the greatest reward is service to the African masses and the oppressed of the world.

We learned from Prof Moyo that the land and agrarian struggles are foundational to the liberation of the African continent. We learned from Prof Moyo’s principled defence of the African revolution that the revolutionary process is served best by rigorous scholarship. From Prof Moyo’s agitation and scholarship we learned the truth of the Zimbabwean land revolution and were able to counter the imperialist lies better.

The avalanche of lies and condemnation from imperialism and its agents never stopped, but in the face of the tireless revolutionary scholarship of Prof Moyo these mountains of lies paled into insignificance. We learned from Prof Moyo that without committed intellectuals the people perish. Africa must grow her own intellectuals, driven by the singular desire to serve this blighted continent.

Today, we march with less certainty because one who could see further than most of us, is no longer amongst us. We however, take solace in the knowledge that Prof Moyo left us foundations strong enough to take the process of building the African revolution further.

We South Africans remain a people shackled by colonial and neo-colonial bondage. We as South Africans remain landless after twenty-one years of pseudo-independence.

We have learned from Prof Moyo how to do battle against the intellectual deceit of the West. On our part, we commit to honor his memory through tirelessly working for the return of our land and attainment of self-reliance because we know only through returning our land first can we be on our way to putting blacks first in a world that puts blacks last.

To the people of Zimbabwe, his friends and colleagues and the entire anti-imperialist world, we say may the black gods strengthen you at this time. To his family, we thank you for sharing with us this brilliant gift from the Black Gods.

I was shocked to hear this news - Sam was a giant of African studies, Agrarian Studies and critical geography, and he will be sorely missed. I feel incredibly fortunate for having been able to benefit from his insights, warm personality and mentorship. I remember him as always being interested in others’ work, especially that of junior scholars. As you say: his legacy will live on and we owe it to him to continue the struggles he was so pivotal in.

Sam Moyo is gone. A terrible car accident in India has robbed Africa of one of its finest sons. From Dakar to Dar es Salaam we are mourning the loss of such a profound professor and personality.

As tributes pour from Cape to Cairo, I am moved to share my brief, albeit, profound encounter with someone whose being combined a great sense of African brotherhood/sisterhood and intellectual rigor.

His name must have crossed my mind prior to our first meeting at the Julius Nyerere Intellectual Festival Week at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM). As a colleague of the later Professor Seithy Chachage at the Council for the Development of Social Science Research (CODESRIA), his name had to be familiar. It was splashed across publications and papers in our home's library.

To Chachage, Moyo was such an important voice. When the land crisis began to unravel in Zimbabwe, I was still an undergraduate student at the University of Cape Town (UCT). The situation was so mind-boggling especially when I got the chance to debate it with my schoolmates who hailed from there. My decision to travel by bus from South Africa to Tanzania via Zimbabwe did not help me much to make sense of what was happening especially when I was almost left at the border because of being asked for a bribe.

Hence one of the papers that I tried to skim through to make sense of what was going on in what Mwalimu Nyerere once referred to as the 'Jewel of Africa' was Chachage's 'Zimbabwe's Current Land Crisis: Some Reflections on Its History'. Unknown to the skimmer in me then was that it drew heavily from Sam's work on the ground. He wrote it 2000 way before many scholars started to acknowledge, even if reluctantly, Sam's profound insights on 'land matters'.

Citing Sam Moyo's (1995) seminal book on 'The Land Question in Zimbabwe', Chachage concluded his paper in a 'prophetic tone':

"One thing that is clear, as far as the Zimbabwe crisis is concerned, is the fact that land reform is necessary. Even the opposition party that campaigned against the constitutional change proposals concedes to this fact. More important, as the history outlined above demonstrates, is the fact that a government that abandons the policies of social provisioning and land reforms as a means to redress the historical imbalances is bound to land in the same problems that Zimbabwe is currently facing. Productivist positions and the Darwinist cynicism of the cult of the winner are dangerous in the face of naked inequalities. These forget that even broader economic perspectives suggest that land reform, as it happened in South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, for example, 'lead to an income distribution structure and rural employment benefits conducive for a growing industrial sector.' It is clear that without the resolution of the land question (which includes the national question in the case of Zimbabwe), the crisis will continue."

But it was only after I came to know Sam personally later on that I really got to appreciate his vast knowledge and willingness to share with those who thirst for it. If there is someone who has shaped my understanding of 'land problems' in Southern Africa then it is him.

Even though we both knew that we are not entirely in the same 'school of thought', he was patient, 'tolerant' and 'open-minded' enough to interact with me without necessarily imposing his 'old Marxist' perspective on me. As I go through our exchanges I can almost sense the dilemma and zeal to uphold the principle of academic 'freedom' while maintaining the urge for 'recruiting'.

When I asked 'Why are Marxists/Leftists obsessed with Class Analysis at the expense of Cultural Analysis?' he thus responded:

"As a self-proclaimed Marxist too, I have no problems with analysing culture; but I would think that one has to examine the dynamic structural and social conditions under which culture (which is not static) is produced or evolves. Moreover, many aspects of culture have an ideological value or purpose, and they can become commodified, and these tendencies make 'culture' amenable to various hegemonic projects, including the dominance of neoliberal imperialist agendas. But I admit many Marxists understudy culture, and even ignore its existence and purpose, when dealing with class analysis!"

Little wonder when I had to choose between two universities in the US to pursue my PhD studies in 2011, he tried to convince me to go to the one where a couple of his 'lifelong Marxist' colleagues were teaching. In a humorous way, he pointed out that the other one is simply basking in its old glory like those folks who invoke their successful past as a cover-up for their present fall from grace. Yet after I had made a decision to go there anyway, he wished me luck after asking: "When do you go to the fountain of knowledge?"

Nevertheless that fountain did not really quench the thirst for the knowledge that Sam was busily disseminating in the 'Global South.' No wonder we were both so glad when I took a short course on 'The Political Economy of Natural Resources' in June 2015 at the Nyerere Resource Center (NRC/KAVAZI) in Dar. Little did I know that will be the last time I see him face-to-face and hear him give a lecture 'live'. Taken by his take on the 'Theory of Rent', I jotted the following comments on top of my head in an online public debate:

Someone - I think, Sam Moyo - has attempted to define financial outflows in terms of the rent theory's dichotomy of 'ground' and 'differential' rents. By doing so, one realises that there is thin line between the 'licit' and the 'illicit' or the 'legal' and the 'illegal'. To put it simply, in the context of the debate below, the TNCs/FDIs are 'licitly/legally authorised' to even collect (large) part/share of the (absolute) 'ground' rent from the land and natural resources that belong to the people/places they are 'investing' their 'capital' in. In this regard, I agree that this is not simply semantics. Preoccupation with the 'illicit' masks the 'licit'. Both are draining Africa(ns).

After his 'heavy' lecturers all I wanted was to rush home to cool my brain. But he insisted that I join them for a drink and snack. It was our 'last supper'. Afterwards, I forwarded to all an article that we only passingly discussed in the course but which was not in the reader. His response to my email was brief but now so memorable:

"Thanks comrade Chambi. It was good to see you after so long!"

Ever reading and learning, Sam asked me to email him copies of some of the articles in the course reader that he did not have in his collections. I promised to do so. But the procrastinator in me kept getting on my way. Feeling guilty, I sent him a quick email to let him know I will do so asap. Alas, his "Thanks" was the last email I got from him. For five months I travelled across three continents with the scrap paper below that I had jotted down names of the authors of those articles. While I was finally feeling like fulfilling the promise I had made, unknowingly to me, he was laying in a hospital bed fighting for the life yet in him and breathing his last.

Mahmood Mamdani's tribute to his friend Sam, like that by Dzodzi Tsikata and Ebrima Sall, on behalf of CODESRIA, and Ian Scoones', have touched a sensitive nerve about "the politics of knowledge production and its recognition" on and in Africa(ns). No matter how modest one may be, it hurts the intellect to experience it firsthand. After all, even the bravest of firebrands are humans too. Yes, they think but they also feel. So was the Sam who penned these touching words after I forwarded to Wanazuoni's listserv in 2009 an article entitled The second scramble for Africa starts:

"Now that all these people are saying what your dad and I wrote about since the 1990s on land alienation, I feel sad that they are the ones being credited for the discovery, simply because they have the audience and new 'facts'. The green book was about this, synthesizing the ensuing events. What is our knowledge management process?"

Yet he was generous enough to give credit where it was due while maintaining both a critical eye and empirical stance without being clouded by scholarly jealousy as evidenced in these comments about Legitimating common property in Africa and the Nobel Prize:

"Yes its a good article and the prize is well deserved. But this perspective is not new in the literature on land in Africa, although the point needs to be repeated until many more people recognize it. You might be interested to know that I used Ostrom's perspective in my 1995 book on Zim land, and that it has been an important influence on some aspects of my subsequent writings. We ordinary scholars have long accepted this perpective, it is the rightwing scholars, various elites and their donors who have refused to acknowledge this view for long. Incidentally I was the sole author of the ECA booklet referenced by the writer of the posted article, and am one of the 7 co-authors of the recently published AU guidelines, which the writer wrongly claims were done under the guidance of Okoth Ogendo."

Under such a skewed political economy of knowledge production and recognition, it is high time that we acknowledge our African scholars and their groundbreaking works. It is so refreshing to read, among others, the tributes that Bella Matambanadzo, Alex Magaisa and Godfrey Massay have written to their mentor and friend, Sam. It is a testament to his profound intellectual nurturing and sharing.

Deservingly, in memory of his role the African Institute of Agrarian Studies (AIAS) that he co-founded is now considering renaming the annual summer school that it holds in collaboration with institutions like the Land Rights Research and Resources Institute (LARRRI/HAKIARDHI), the Sam Moyo Annual Agrarian Summer School. May his fiery Pan-African legacy live on and on.